There really are WAY too many half-assed ways to do things in script. Perl, Tcl, Python, Bash, Csh, Tcsh, PHP. I must have 20 MySql drivers to support all of these bloody languages. I have to run several Apache modules because some software uses mod_perl, others use PHP, and all of my In-House software uses TCL.
All of the script languages have morphed into accomplishing the same goal, they all just do it with a different syntax. Some scripts are clean looking and easy to follow, others are executable line-noise.
It would make documentation and maintenance a LOT simply to pick one scripting language and develop it into an all-purpose tool. I'm sick of reimplementing script libraries.
Actually I'm not. Not by a longshot. Look up at the top of the food chain, and you would see people easily making 10 times my salary. The average VP (and we have a lot of them) starts at 5 times my salary.
It would be one thing if there was a light at the end of the tunnel. There is not. We as a culture are being run into the ground. For nothing more than greed. As soon as we burn out, we are replaced by folks who are willing to work for a fraction of what we are.
Welcome to hell.
For the record business does NOT operate like that. At least not for very long. 4000 years ago Sun Tzu spoke of these matters:
Therefore, both advantage and danger are inherent in maneuvering for an advantageous position. One who sets the entire army in motion with impediments to pursue an advantageous position will not attain it. If he abandons the camp and all the impediments to contend for advantage, the stores will be lost. Thus, if one orders his men to make forced marches without armor, stopping neither day nor night, covering double the usual distance at a stretch, and doing a hundred li to wrest an advantage, it is probable that the commanders will be captured. The stronger men will arrive first and the feeble ones will struggle along behind; so, if this method is used, only one-tenth of the army will reach its destination. In a forced march of fifty li, the commander of the van will probably fall, but half the army will arrive. In a forced march of thirty li, just two-thirds will arrive. It follows that an army which lacks heavy equipment, fodder, food, and stores will be lost.
Leaders have known for thousands of years that there are limits to human endurance, and that it is never a good idea to operate at that level.
the players a paid a hell of a lot more than the coaches
There are a lot more coaches than players
There is a definite corelation between performance and continued employment.
In the news an editor's whole job is to act as a filter through which a reporter's work must pass on its way to print. If something wrotten gets into the paper, IT WAS the editor's job to keep it out.
In IT we are asked to an awful lot of seemingly unrelated things. I'm the keeper of the backups. I run the email server. I fish and splice cable. I build servers. I program the staff website. I evaluate new technology, maintain the dialup pool, swap the decks, tote the barges, and otherwise keep the lights on. And did I mention our department maintains all of the front-line sales equipment?
Now in a well run organization, someone would look at the IT department, see that its filled with people on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and hire some additional staff. All I get is shit, regularly, about the backlog of projects.
Now you were expecting me to bitch about salary, weren't you? No. I need more staff. My boss knows we need more staff. Our VP knows we need more staff. HR knows we need more staff, and that I undergo a nervous breakdown every year or so.
I would argue that ballots are no more or less secure than ever. The whole idea behind an election is that with a large enough representative sample the will of the people is heard. That includes some measure of corruption in the polling system. Granted too much corruption will affect the outcome.
The Florida issue was about civil ineptitude and the parties throwing out lukewarm candidates. Face it the difference between Bush and Gore was statistical noise. If the election hadn't been so damn close, none of the counting would have been an issue.
Onto your other point, a move from a democratically elected republic to a pure democracy would involve remaking our political system from scratch. Our constitution is DESIGNED to be a republic. To try to adapt it to be a pure democracy would be like trying to adapt a delivery van into a segway scooter. They are 2 vehicles designed for 2 completely different purposes.
Now, let us say that sometime in the future a pure democracy does indeed superceed the constitutional republic. There are some real design problems with a democracy.
Only those with an interest in politics tend to get involved. You end up with the same incestuous politics as our current system.
When the masses do get involved, they tend to enact short-sighted feel-good measures. They want tons of services for no taxes. Lets see... just like the present system!
Generally the masses are driven to action by demogauges. Demogagues tend to have agendas that are not often in the best interest of the country as a whole. At least our present political system forces demogagues to either be electable or be content to hit the talk-show circuit.
I'm not shooting down the idea. But like all ideas, there are some serious flaws with it. Remember, the Greeks had democracy before Plato came up with the Republic.
We need electronic voting NOW and we need open source NOW. We can't afford to wait 50 or 60 years.
Hold the phone.
Why NOW? We have managed to survive as a people for 250 years before the invention of the computer, and as a civilization for 10 millenia.
Computers and Open Source are not a fix, an improvement, or a reform in unto themselves. They are a means. You can implement some pretty crappy things in Open Source, or some earth-shatteringly well engineered things. The Open Source, while it helps, does not mandate quality.
Electronic Voting is a bad toy. It delivers one and only one improvement over our existing ballot system: instant returns. That's it. There are no improvements in reliability, security, or oppertunity inherent in electronic voting. I for one am sick of election night being covered like sporting events.
Votes cast must still go through the rigorous checks and certifications that existing paper and mechanical ballots go through. Not so much to satisfy beaurocracy, as to satisfy the voter. The process of democracy wins regardless of which candidate is elected. Being able to go back and reconstruct an election bolsters winners, and reassures loosers. It occasionally will upset the original results, but only rarely and only in extreme cases.
Crap processed electronically is still crap. Anyone who uses computers and has not gained a healthy skepticism about them is a danger to themselves and their profession.
Hey, don't forget about plain old managerial ineptitude. Every year I tell them that I need this, this, and this to be able to do my job effectively. They say "that's nice".
Then they run me through a gauntlet every time something breaks. I'm used to it. My assistant still takes it personally.
But regardless of how we techies need to do X, remember that many of us are not in a position to allocate resources. We have to work with the meager scraps that management deigns to pour into our bowl.
The actual registration of votes is not the problem.
The problem is in counting the votes. You have to track the chain of custody from the voting booth to the final number. Every step of the way should require a certification from an election official. The certification states that the official saw the numbers, they made sense. If something is completely screwy the official is obiligated by law to declare shenanigans.
As such, you could stage an election with paper and pencil, stones, or broken clay pots. The computers should only be used to make the counting faster. They cannot be trusted in any other regard.
It should point out that the rules of accounting by which ATMs operate is open source. Every bank follows a set of published standard accounting practices.
Banks are regularly audited by both industry AND government. They also rely on the government to enforce laws, and track down those who rob banks.
There is no "pure capitalism". It has to be coupled with a baseline of social services and law enforcement to operate.
but how many of "us" will realize the necessity of that? People are SO used to MS as being the only thing out there for computers and not knowing that there is such a thing as "open source" and that "trade secrets" aren't the most important thing when it comes to security.
People once thought that women and minorities were inferior, slavery was ok, and only landholders should have a say in anything, and you can pay off your sins by giving to the Church. We have gotten past those issues, we can get past these as well.
Hey, the designers of the Queen Mary thought the ship would be so stable on the seas they didn't install handrails in the corridors.
The ship gained a reputation for being very unstable and rocky. It almost capsized once. (Ironic since the Queen Mary was the ship used for the exterior shots on The Posieden Adventure.)
Hey, my bank is Scat-Fetish-Jizz-Gobbler! My god you should see the nasty checks I have to choose from. I try to stay away from the books of checks where they pages are sticking together.
Say, you could also deposit the money into a short term money market and be earning interest on it for the few weeks it is in your posession.
Each server has a copy of the portage tree that is cloned from the build server. The make.conf file has them all use a common distfiles and packages directory over NFS. I do one step further and add a subdirectory for each architecture (i686, i486, etc). I was experimenting with compiling for athlon and pentiumIII, but I found that I really wasn't getting anything for the extra build time for each architecture. Now everything on my network is generic i686. I keep i486 around for some older equipment I deploy as kiosks.
Linus strongly believes in remaining neutral. Once he starts playing games with revoking trademarks, he will find himself in the middle of everyone's legal battle. He is taking the higher ground of ignoring injury in the name of peace. You never know when an ally will be an enemy in the future, or an enemy an ally.
As far as the corrupt code, you would first have to accept that any exists at all. The Linux community has no motivation to steal SCO's property. Code is continually maintained and revised, so either the code has been in there for so long it's unrecognizable, or so new that the window between it actually making it into the kernel and the start of the lawsuit is small.
And SCO has thusfar failed to mitigate damages by revealing what the infringing code is. Anyone that is subject to this lawsuit can, and will, argue that any damages since the start of SCO's suit are on SCO.
So you can cease to worry about damages after the start of the suit. You can also cease to worry about damages BEFORE the start of the suit. Up until a few months ago, SCO was actively selling Linux, and in accordance with the GPL, granting an unrestricted license to all patents and copyrights.
Well, they couldn't afford a horse's head, so I got a Gerbil's. They also can't afford a Godfather, Daryl is the Nephew. The hitman is armed with a waterpistol filled with lemon juice.
I just happend to be in that 20%. Just because you don't need it, doesn't mean its crap. By that logic we all should have been happy with Windows 98.
My problem is that I need to maintain a pile of servers. Compile time isn't the issue, they are dual 1Ghz machines with boatloads of RAM. I found under RedHat I was downloading and compiling most of my major packages anyway because I needed a newer version than was available. And I just don't trust outside binaries. They have bitten me in the ass on a lot of occasions.
Now in a production environment, once I build a box, it stays built. I only fix the parts that need patching because of security vulnerabilities. In my case Gentoo is a perfect fit.
At home I like to play DVD's, dump video from my camcorder, and use my playstation through the frame grabber on my quasi-supported video card. While binaries do exist that let me do that I've found them brittle and buggy. I'm pulling off a new package to do this and that every week. I find the source approach simpler to maintain. Again, Gentoo is a perfect fit.
Is it a perfect fit for everyone? No. For most people? Hell no. For me? Yes.
In those cases I build the entire OS on a modern box, chroot, and perform the install. Once the "new" OS is ready I make it into a tarball. During the installation on the thinkpad, I simply use my tarball instead of one of the Gentoo stages.
And btw, emerging small packages isn't all that bad. Would I try to build KDE? No. But then again, you wouldn't really want to run KDE on a thin machine like that either. XFCE is good enough for me. Anything more complicated and I just run the programs off my big machine through ssh, or just slave the laptop over to the big machine with:
Slashdot Mirror
All of the script languages have morphed into accomplishing the same goal, they all just do it with a different syntax. Some scripts are clean looking and easy to follow, others are executable line-noise.
It would make documentation and maintenance a LOT simply to pick one scripting language and develop it into an all-purpose tool. I'm sick of reimplementing script libraries.
It would be one thing if there was a light at the end of the tunnel. There is not. We as a culture are being run into the ground. For nothing more than greed. As soon as we burn out, we are replaced by folks who are willing to work for a fraction of what we are.
Welcome to hell.
For the record business does NOT operate like that. At least not for very long. 4000 years ago Sun Tzu spoke of these matters:
Leaders have known for thousands of years that there are limits to human endurance, and that it is never a good idea to operate at that level.
In sports:
In the news an editor's whole job is to act as a filter through which a reporter's work must pass on its way to print. If something wrotten gets into the paper, IT WAS the editor's job to keep it out.
In IT we are asked to an awful lot of seemingly unrelated things. I'm the keeper of the backups. I run the email server. I fish and splice cable. I build servers. I program the staff website. I evaluate new technology, maintain the dialup pool, swap the decks, tote the barges, and otherwise keep the lights on. And did I mention our department maintains all of the front-line sales equipment?
Now in a well run organization, someone would look at the IT department, see that its filled with people on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and hire some additional staff. All I get is shit, regularly, about the backlog of projects.
Now you were expecting me to bitch about salary, weren't you? No. I need more staff. My boss knows we need more staff. Our VP knows we need more staff. HR knows we need more staff, and that I undergo a nervous breakdown every year or so.
I would argue that ballots are no more or less secure than ever. The whole idea behind an election is that with a large enough representative sample the will of the people is heard. That includes some measure of corruption in the polling system. Granted too much corruption will affect the outcome.
The Florida issue was about civil ineptitude and the parties throwing out lukewarm candidates. Face it the difference between Bush and Gore was statistical noise. If the election hadn't been so damn close, none of the counting would have been an issue.
Onto your other point, a move from a democratically elected republic to a pure democracy would involve remaking our political system from scratch. Our constitution is DESIGNED to be a republic. To try to adapt it to be a pure democracy would be like trying to adapt a delivery van into a segway scooter. They are 2 vehicles designed for 2 completely different purposes.
Now, let us say that sometime in the future a pure democracy does indeed superceed the constitutional republic. There are some real design problems with a democracy.
- Only those with an interest in politics tend to get involved. You end up with the same incestuous politics as our current system.
- When the masses do get involved, they tend to enact short-sighted feel-good measures. They want tons of services for no taxes. Lets see... just like the present system!
- Generally the masses are driven to action by demogauges. Demogagues tend to have agendas that are not often in the best interest of the country as a whole. At least our present political system forces demogagues to either be electable or be content to hit the talk-show circuit.
I'm not shooting down the idea. But like all ideas, there are some serious flaws with it. Remember, the Greeks had democracy before Plato came up with the Republic.Hold the phone.
Why NOW? We have managed to survive as a people for 250 years before the invention of the computer, and as a civilization for 10 millenia.
Computers and Open Source are not a fix, an improvement, or a reform in unto themselves. They are a means. You can implement some pretty crappy things in Open Source, or some earth-shatteringly well engineered things. The Open Source, while it helps, does not mandate quality.
Electronic Voting is a bad toy. It delivers one and only one improvement over our existing ballot system: instant returns. That's it. There are no improvements in reliability, security, or oppertunity inherent in electronic voting. I for one am sick of election night being covered like sporting events.
Votes cast must still go through the rigorous checks and certifications that existing paper and mechanical ballots go through. Not so much to satisfy beaurocracy, as to satisfy the voter. The process of democracy wins regardless of which candidate is elected. Being able to go back and reconstruct an election bolsters winners, and reassures loosers. It occasionally will upset the original results, but only rarely and only in extreme cases.
Crap processed electronically is still crap. Anyone who uses computers and has not gained a healthy skepticism about them is a danger to themselves and their profession.
Then they run me through a gauntlet every time something breaks. I'm used to it. My assistant still takes it personally.
But regardless of how we techies need to do X, remember that many of us are not in a position to allocate resources. We have to work with the meager scraps that management deigns to pour into our bowl.
The problem is in counting the votes. You have to track the chain of custody from the voting booth to the final number. Every step of the way should require a certification from an election official. The certification states that the official saw the numbers, they made sense. If something is completely screwy the official is obiligated by law to declare shenanigans.
As such, you could stage an election with paper and pencil, stones, or broken clay pots. The computers should only be used to make the counting faster. They cannot be trusted in any other regard.
Banks are regularly audited by both industry AND government. They also rely on the government to enforce laws, and track down those who rob banks.
There is no "pure capitalism". It has to be coupled with a baseline of social services and law enforcement to operate.
People once thought that women and minorities were inferior, slavery was ok, and only landholders should have a say in anything, and you can pay off your sins by giving to the Church. We have gotten past those issues, we can get past these as well.
The ship gained a reputation for being very unstable and rocky. It almost capsized once. (Ironic since the Queen Mary was the ship used for the exterior shots on The Posieden Adventure.)
Reminds me of "the rope" from Prayer of the Rollar Boys. It was a street drug that left the use sterile. Cheezy movie, but I love cheezy movies.
and i'm just typeing here to keep the yell filter happy
There seem to be an awful lot of flustered folks to back that hoax up with...
I don't know about that, the number seems to be down to only 404.
Say, you could also deposit the money into a short term money market and be earning interest on it for the few weeks it is in your posession.
Each server has a copy of the portage tree that is cloned from the build server. The make.conf file has them all use a common distfiles and packages directory over NFS. I do one step further and add a subdirectory for each architecture (i686, i486, etc). I was experimenting with compiling for athlon and pentiumIII, but I found that I really wasn't getting anything for the extra build time for each architecture. Now everything on my network is generic i686. I keep i486 around for some older equipment I deploy as kiosks.
Though at the rate they are burning cash on lawyers, one has to wonder if SCO the company is going to last that long.
As far as the corrupt code, you would first have to accept that any exists at all. The Linux community has no motivation to steal SCO's property. Code is continually maintained and revised, so either the code has been in there for so long it's unrecognizable, or so new that the window between it actually making it into the kernel and the start of the lawsuit is small.
And SCO has thusfar failed to mitigate damages by revealing what the infringing code is. Anyone that is subject to this lawsuit can, and will, argue that any damages since the start of SCO's suit are on SCO.
So you can cease to worry about damages after the start of the suit. You can also cease to worry about damages BEFORE the start of the suit. Up until a few months ago, SCO was actively selling Linux, and in accordance with the GPL, granting an unrestricted license to all patents and copyrights.
But as we all know, history, logic, and legal precident have no place in a court of law.
Well, they couldn't afford a horse's head, so I got a Gerbil's. They also can't afford a Godfather, Daryl is the Nephew. The hitman is armed with a waterpistol filled with lemon juice.
And when you are done spanking Zoot, you must spank me too. And after that ... the Oral Sex!
Where you deliberately using 'Cos as an anagram for SCO?
How about a new corporate logo for SCO: the Scodo. A big, clumsy, and rather extinct bird that tries to dress itself up like a penguin.
My problem is that I need to maintain a pile of servers. Compile time isn't the issue, they are dual 1Ghz machines with boatloads of RAM. I found under RedHat I was downloading and compiling most of my major packages anyway because I needed a newer version than was available. And I just don't trust outside binaries. They have bitten me in the ass on a lot of occasions.
Now in a production environment, once I build a box, it stays built. I only fix the parts that need patching because of security vulnerabilities. In my case Gentoo is a perfect fit.
At home I like to play DVD's, dump video from my camcorder, and use my playstation through the frame grabber on my quasi-supported video card. While binaries do exist that let me do that I've found them brittle and buggy. I'm pulling off a new package to do this and that every week. I find the source approach simpler to maintain. Again, Gentoo is a perfect fit.
Is it a perfect fit for everyone? No. For most people? Hell no. For me? Yes.
And btw, emerging small packages isn't all that bad. Would I try to build KDE? No. But then again, you wouldn't really want to run KDE on a thin machine like that either. XFCE is good enough for me. Anything more complicated and I just run the programs off my big machine through ssh, or just slave the laptop over to the big machine with:
X -indirect thebigbox